We have some external drives that contain multiple volumes formatted.
Partly just to see how HFS and APFS features differ/compare, and or to install boot volumes plus a back up section.
One thing I noticed recently is that Disk Utility running on Sonoma cannot unmount individual volumes to run First Aid… which can be run only for the container as a whole, not the individual volumes
This seems new to Sonoma.
Is this a bug? or a new feature or, more aptly, a marginalized feature in Disk Utility?
This makes sense to me, since all volumes within an APFS container share the same pool of free space. Certain kinds of errors (e.g. in that free-block pool) affect all volumes, so it makes sense to require them all to be checked at once.
For your system’s internal storage, this may be a pain in the neck, but for external storage, you can always choose to put each volume in a separate container. If you do so, then the volumes won’t be able to share free space (much like you will find for HFS+ volumes), but you should be able to check them individually.
I’m sure Alsoft would love to release a version that can repair APFS, but as I understand it, Apple has never released sufficient technical documentation to make it possible to develop such a product.
As much as I’d love a third-party option to Apple’s Disk Utility (which ultimately, is a wrapper around the command-like fsck utility), I do not want a half-baked repair utility based on an incomplete specification.
Sorry for the late reply,
The main reason I wondered, since I’ve only recently had the chance to compare the issue.
Mac OS Ventura is able to unmount any volume under the heading of a container, as well as separate partitions.
Sonoma does not do this … granted over my head, so I would presume that the more current apfs structure is handled differently…? than in previous systems